Told in a vacuum, HBO’s new limited series The Plot Against America, from The Wire creator David Simon and Ed Burns, is top-shelf prestige television. Based on Philip Roth’s acclaimed 2004 novel, the show takes place in an alternate history America in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the 1940 election by hero pilot Charles Lindbergh. It follows the Levins, a close-knit Jewish family living in Newark, New Jersey as flagrant anti-Semitism begins to rise in the wake of Lindbergh’s election. It’s a gripping drama with outstanding performances, but I couldn’t …

Exactly 10 years ago, duly-appointed U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels was in search of a woman. Teddy, a man wearing the burdens of his past in his furrowed brow and hunched shoulders, needed to locate an escape patient named Rachel Solando like his life depended on it. And, to a certain degree, his life was depending on something — but it wasn't finding Rachel. Over the course of all 138 minutes of Shutter Island, we saw just how tenuous the narratives Teddy had constructed to maintain control over his version of reality were. [caption id="attachment_871429" align="alignright" width="…

From creator/writer Craig Mazin and director Johan Renck, the five-part HBO mini-series Chernobyl explores how the 1986 nuclear accident become one of the worst human-made catastrophes in history. After the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, Soviet Union suffered a massive explosion that released radioactive material across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and as far as Scandinavia and western Europe, countless brave men and women sacrificed their own lives, both knowingly and unknowingly, in an attempt to save Europe from unimaginable disaster. During this 1-on-1 phone interview with Collider, actress Emily Watson (who plays Ulana …